The Internet Introduction
Characteristics of the information society
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Characteristics of the information society Some characteristics of the modern information society would include: * the development of information as a central strategic resource in industrial and economic development (hence the centrality of Drucker's 'knowledge workers') on the management and application of which individual units (companies, nations, geographical regions) are increasingly dependent for their competitiveness; of course, all technological changes have always been dependent on information, but 'what differentiates the current process of technological change is that its raw material itself is information, and so is its outcome' (Castells (1989)) or, again, 'what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity' (1996 : 17) * the very rapid growth in informatization of the economy which allows closer links between regional, national and international economies, as well as breaking down the conventional barriers between financial sectors as all work, including manufacturing, becomes increasingly a matter of the transmission of information * the development of global information networks on which what Castells refers to as the 'network society' is based (1996) and without which the rapid rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) would have been impossible; there are now only around a couple of dozen national economies bigger than the economies of the major TNCs * the globalization of capitalism which is facilitated by and is dependent upon those networks, permitting economic decision-making on a world scale in real time; the term globalization does not refer simply to improved ease of communication and interaction between nation states, nor is it purely limited to the economic and business spheres; certainly, globalization does refer to such developments, but refers also to significant cultural changes, including for example greater migration, more international tourism, the development of 'world music', greater international co-operation in political, economic and ecological matters; a minor, but none the less telling, example of this cultural change can be found in the international advertising of certain consumer goods such as jeans, where advertisers often no longer see any necessity to provide different ads for different national markets; it is important, too, to consider the detachment from local constraints, which is afforded by internationalization of the economy, leading to 'a trend that we would call "bureaucratrization" in the Weberian sense, that is the predominance of the rationality of means over the rationality of goals .... the interests of a local business élite, or of a local resident working class, or of a local market, will be constantly subordinated to the need for the organization to be connected simultaneously with the financial markets, the pool of professional labour, the necessary technology...' (Castells (1989: 170)) * the reduction in the constraints of space, whereby Silicon Valley, for example, becomes just another node in the network society, its actual geographical location being largely irrelevant in an economy which has passed, in Negroponte's terms, from shifting around atoms to shifting around bits: The industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The information age, the age of computers, showed us the same economies of scale, but with less regard for space and time. The manufacturing of bits could happen anywhere, at any time, and, for example, move among the stock markets of New York, London, and Tokyo as if they were three adjacent machine tools. Nevertheless, this freedom from the constraints of space still remains something of a myth so far. Castells points out, for example, that something as simple as the radial construction of the electrical grid in the USA can act as a brake on decentralization simply because areas outside major urban centres are more likely to suffer power cuts. Negroponte Post-Fordism The term post-Fordism is also used to refer to the new information age. The term derives from Henry Ford's use of 'scientific management' in his car plants, a method of rationalization of all processes of management. The production process was broken down into its smallest component processes, each of which was performed by a single worker, who thus repeated the same series of actions within the same space throughout the working day, the rhythm of his work being determined by the speed of the production line. Ford offered his workers the then extraordinary sum of $5 per hour to put up with the alienating practices in his plants, $5 which was meant not only to stimulate production but also to stimulate consumption, hopefully of Ford cars. Post-Fordism is seen as having the following characteristics, in addition to those enumerated above: a shift to the new "information technologies;" more flexible, decentralized forms of labour process and work organization; decline of the old manufacturing base and the growth of the "sunrise," computer-based industries; the hiving off or contracting out of functions and services; a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on marketing, packaging, and design, on the "targeting" of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by categories of social class; a decline in the proportion of the skilled, male, manual working class, the rise of the service and white-collar classes and the "feminization" of the work force; an economy dominated by the multinationals, with their new international division of labor and their greater autonomy from nation-state control; and the "globalization" of the new financial markets, linked by the communications revolution Hall (1991b) Perhaps the key word in that quotation, certainly for anyone who has been at the sharp end of modern employment practices, is flexibility, which is always enumerated as one of the defining characteristics of post-Fordism. Frank Webster (1995) suggests that the term covers the following three types of flexibility:
Source Employment Department Edition: 25 Published 1995 Crown Copyright - Social Trends 1995 figures in thousands; full or part-time is based on the respondents' own assessment; the figures shown are determined at Spring each year and include employees, self-employed, those on government training schemes and unpaid family workers time flexibility is widespread - employees are appointed on fixed term contracts, some even on a series of weekly contracts, which means that employers have no responsibility for sick pay, holiday pay and other benefits; increasingly employees' hours are not fixed, except within a very broad framework and weekend working or working on public holidays no longer attracts overtime payments; indeed in Britain, were it not for limitations imposed by the European Union, employees would have no upper limit to their working week; the 'feminization' of the workforce proceeds apace as women seem more willing to take short-term, part-time work - in part because it suits their family commitments (still generally seen as a woman's responsibility), in part because it is the kind of work women more traditionally accept - and because of that employers are more likely to appoint women to such jobs. It is predicted that if current trends continue in Britain there will be more women than men in employment by the year 2010. Many of those employees will form part of the 'contingency workforce' hired and fired at will by employers who retain only a small core of permanent employees. As Castells sees it, a 'core/periphery' model of the labour force is developing, with ever greater concentration of employment on the 'knowledge élite' and the increasing automation of skilled manual and office jobs pushing those outside that élite into 'flexible', temporary and haphazard work, into what Gorz refers to as the 'servile class'. This servile class is to be found in even the most successful sectors. In Silicon Valley, between 27% and 40% of employees are 'contingency employees' and the rate of workers employed by temp agencies is three times higher than the US average. Microsoft's famous blue and orange badge scheme may represent the future of work for many of us. The blue badge holders are Castells's 'core' and between 4,000 and 5,000 orange badge holders make up the 'periphery' of temporary workers, even though many do the same jobs as the blue badge holdrs who got there first and even though many have been there so long they refer to themselves as 'permatemps'. In 1990 Microsoft was challenged by the Internal Revenue Service which argued that many of these 'independent contractors' were in fact Microsoft employees and Microsoft should therefore be paying the payroll tax. As a result of that the 'independent contractors' launched a suit against Microsoft claiming the same benefits as the blue badge holders. They won. Far from accepting that, from then on, it would have to fulfill its obligations to its employees, Microsoft went on to develop a system whereby any new 'independent contractors', though scouted by Microsoft, are actually employed by outside agencies. Just to ensure that they cannot be mistaken for Microsoft employees, they are barred from all extracurricular activities. All temps who have worked for the company for a year are required to take a thirty-one day break before being rehired as temps. (source: Klein (2000 : 249-252)) Bill Gates, one of the world's most generous philanthropists, has joined a campaign led by his father and supported by many of the wealthiest businesspeople in America, calling on George W Bush to drop his plans to scrap inheritance tax, which, they say, should be used to benefit the poor and to prevent the development of an aristocracy of the wealthy in the US. What a warm heart he has. * flexibility of production: information networks tend to break down the hierarchical and inflexible structures of Fordist organization. For example, computerized stock control which automatically places orders with suppliers when stocks are low, makes it unnecessary for manufacturers or supermarkets to carry large supplies of stock, thus saving on warehousing, the employment costs of warehousemen and the costs of unsold stock. Instead, just-in-time (JIT) methods are used whereby the supplier constantly tops up a minimal amount of stock held by the manufacturer or supermarket. Where manufacturing is concerned, modern computerized methods of production make it possible for suppliers economically to produce relatively small runs of products to meet their customers' needs. Without the information technology, JIT methods would be impossible. The so-called vertical disintegration of companies is also an important characteristic of post-Fordist organizations. Fordist companies were typically vertically integrated, meaning that they would try to produce within a single company all the items needed to produce the final product. This vertical integration would also be reflected in a hierarchical company structure, where the company would be split into various departments, each responsible for the production of a certain set of items and each with its own heads, foremen etc. The post-Fordist organization has downsized (in terms of employee numbers) by outsourcing large amounts of work to other companies, a change which tends also to be reflected in a flatter company structure, with fewer levels in the organization's hierarchy. The advantage to the company is that it can readily switch suppliers, to whom it owes no loyalty, playing them off against one another and greatly reduces any industrial relations work within its own company, as well as reducing the social costs of National Insurance contributions, sickness benefit etc. within its own workforce. Benetton is often quoted as the archetypal example here, as it has around 12,000 workers, but only around 1,500 directly in its employ, outsourcing most of its work via a franchising system (Webster (1995)) A common component of 'flexibility' is also that workers, even if they are poorly paid and receive only rudimentary training, for example if fast-food chains or leisure centres, are increasingly required to carry out a variety of different roles. Thus, it would seem, upskilling of the workforce goes hand-in-hand with depression of incomes (except for the bosses', of course). The outsourcing is not limited to suppliers within the manufacturer's own country. Information technology, for example, allows software companies to outsource much of their coding to highly skilled, but poorly paid, programmers on the other side of the globe. The same technology also allows many manufacturers to shift the manufacturing process itself to other countries, preferably those where labour protection is slight or non-existent and where wages are low. Naomi Klein reports that a study by the NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Association) labour commission found that in the US between 1993 and 1995 'employers threatened to close the plant in 50% of all union certification elections' and that in 15% of those cases the employers followed through. (Klein (2000 : 223)) Manufacturing industry slips quietly away to the sweatshops of the third world, leaving the service industries as the only game in town, and free to depress wages and worsen working conditions. * flexibility of consumption: the new technologies make shorter production runs cost-effective, which means that products can be more 'individualized' than the 'mass' consumption products of the past, allowing consumers greater flexibility in their 'lifestyle choices'; again, Benetton is often quoted as an example here, its automated cash registers, feeding information back to headquarters allowing the company to adjust output to customer demand in around ten days only. The new flexibility of consumption has led advertising agencies to pay less attention to the socio-economic groups - social 'classes' - which were formerly seen as reasonably reliable predictors of behaviour and attitudes and more attention to lifestyles, as people break away from the conventional patterns which once characterized their belonging to a particular class, constructing differentiated lifestyles for themselves through the pattern of choices they make as consumers. (see the section on lifestyle analysis) Some theorists, as has been said above, have considered these developments to be radically new. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques in particular referred to post-Fordist times as 'new times'. It is interesting that the political left in Britain, in searching for an explanation of the Labour Party's repeated failure to defeat Thatcherism, ends up with a conceptualization of modern society which is not so far removed from the conservative theorizing of Daniel Bell. Hall and Jacques are hopeful about post-Fordism, in which they see the proliferation of the sites of antagonism and resistance, and the appearance of new subjects, new social movements, new collective identities - an enlarged sphere for the operation of politics, and new constituencies for change Hall and Jacques (1989): 17 Age of access I have referred above to the vertical disintegration of modern companies, downsizing, the tendency to buy in (or 'outsource') services and products, from cleaning and catering through to accountancy and the production of major components. Also, rather than carrying large inventories of components, manufacturers have moved to 'just-in-time delivery', which saves them the expense of managing a large amount of stock and enables them to be more flexible, shifting much of the risk of fluctuations in demand to their suppliers. Jeremy Rifkin (2000) has noted how widespread this trend has become in what he has christened the 'age of access', in which the fundamental basis of capitalism, the market, the buying and exchanging of goods is beginning to disintegrate, markets being replaced by networks and ownership by access. As individual consumers, most of us are already familiar with this to an extent - we hire TVs, video recorders and video tapes, telephone answering services and so on, rather than owning the actual machinery. The hire of other domestic appliances - washing machines, tumble driers, cookers - is becoming more common. Especially amongst the urban young, home ownership is giving way to renting, car ownership to car hire, as they shed the inconveniences and encumbrances of ownership, so as to remain flexible and mobile, responsive to the labour market's demands. As users of software we have never owned the products we use, merely a licence, though it continues to feel as if we own them. As Net delivery progresses towards broadband, it seems increasingly unlikely that we will do no more than rent the software as and when we need to use it, downloading appropriate bits of it across the Net from Application Service Providers, amongst whom Microsoft clearly intends, in part via its .Net project, to become a major player. Microsoft in fact is one of the best examples of this new propertyless capitalism. In November 1996 IBM owned $16.6 billion in plants, equipment and property and its market capitalization was $70.7 billion. At the same time Microsoft's market capitalization was $85.5 billion, but the value of its fixed assets was a mere $930 million (Rifkin (2000 : 50)). Rifkin also similarly compares General Motors and Chrysler, the former holding a vast amount of physical assets, but looking like a liability in the modern economy, whereas the latter, which has divested itself of much of its property to become more of a design studio than a car manufacturer, turns in very healthy profits. That term 'design studio' is key. In a current TV commercial for Renault's 'Picasso' car, robots are seen playfully sketching out Picasso-like designs in black paint on a white car to the background song 'Je ne veux pas travailler'. When the company's logo appears in the last screen it is sub-titled 'Renault - créateur d'automobiles'. 'Creator', you'll note, not 'manufacturer' or 'producer', 'créateur' even, the cachet of the French name, like a perfume, a fashion accessory, a stylish dress or the latest restaurant. Rifkin comments that In the new network economy what is really being bought and sold are ideas and images. The physical embodiment of these ideas and images becomes increasingly secondary to the economic process. If the industrial marketplace was characterized by the exchange of things, the network economy is characterized by access to concepts, carried inside physical forms. Rifkin (2000 : 47) - the realization, then, of Negroponte's prediction of the ascendancy of bits over atoms, of Baudrillard's 'aesthetic hallucination of reality'. http://www.nike.com/ buy into the lifestyle; even customize your own shoe (as long as you don't want the word 'sweatshop' on it) http://nikebiz.com/ let them tell you how socially responsible they are Boycott Nike then read the alternative version Corporate Watch - Nike's Sweatshops just screw it http://www.gapsucks.org/ gap = crap Nike is often quoted as the example of this new economy. As Naomi Klein emphasizes (Klein 2000 : 50ff), whatever else, Nike may be, it is not a manufacturer of sports shoes. The company is almost non-existent, the very epitome of a virtual company. Its shoes are made by a network of mainly anonymous South-East Asian sweatshops, while headquarters specializes in design and the cultivation of the brand. Even large chunks of its marketing and advertising are outsourced. What it sells is a mythologized lifestyle, initially based around the use of Michael Jordan as the embodiment of that myth, flying through the air in suspended animation, buoyed up by Nike's hi-tech shoes. These TV spots, says Klein, were 'the first rock videos about sports', turning Michael Jordan, as he himself has said, into 'a dream'. Nike's shops are not just retail outlets. They are even called Nike Town. Each one is a shrine, a place set apart for the faithful, a mausoleum. The Manhattan Nike Town on East Fifty-seventh Street is more than a fancy store fitted with the requisite brushed chrome and blond wood, it is a temple where the swoosh is worshipped as both art and heroic symbol. The swoosh is equated with sports at every turn: in reverent glass display cases depicting 'The definition of an athlete'; in the inspirational quotes about about 'Courage', 'Honor', 'Victory' and 'Teamwork' inlaid in the floorboards; and in the building's dedication 'to all athletes and their dreams'. (Klein 2000 : 56) The actual Vietnamese producers of Nike's shoes, girls as young as 13 working a sixty-hour week, would, of course, have little time or energy for such aspirations, nor the money ever to buy Nike sportswear, earning as they do between $1.60 and $2.25 per day. In the new weightless economy, Nike doesn't make shoes, Gap doesn't make clothes, MacDonalds don't make burgers. Increasingly, it is the control of ideas that counts, whether the design of a pair of sports shoes, the copyright in Java or the human genetic code. Once computer code is developed, its actual distribution costs are negligible, so negligible that it might just as well be given away. When Red Hat floated, the stock market immediately valued it at billions of dollars. How can a company which has only ever given its operating system away be worth anything at all? How can Sony make a profit if it sells its Playstations at less than their production cost? The answer, of course, is in the intended benefits of locking the customer into a particular system, namely getting the customer to pay for the support, the upgrades, the games. Further, in a network society, there is the hoped-for 'network effect'. There's not much point in being the only person in the world with a telephone, probably not even a lot of point in being one of just a few thousand with a telephone, but once the network reaches a particular critical mass, then there is exponential development. If the customer has your phone, you make money, so there's a distinct advantage to giving them the phone for nothing in the first place. The aim is to establish, if possible, a permanent relationship with the customer. Rifkin (98ff) explains how businesses are gradually letting go of the idea of selling a product to as many customers as possible and replacing it by the idea of selling as many products and services as possible to a single customer, each customer having a given 'lifetime value' (LTV). 'The key,' he writes, is to find the appropriate mechanism to hold on to a customer for life.' The calculation of a lifetime value is increasingly facilitated by the electronic economy. The barcodes on products enable the supermarkets to build up profiles of a range of different consumer types, as do payments by credit card. Store cards and loyalty cards also hand over vital information, which allow stores to correlate purchases with a range of data supplied by the customer when originally applying for the card. Apart from allowing them to mailshot customers by social class, income level, typical purchases or whatever, it also allows them to large subgroups of customers appropriately. Boots, for example, discovered via their loyalty cards that customers who bought nappies, baby foods and the like would also often hand in films for developing. So now Boots stores have the baby section and the photography section in close proximity so as to tempt the proud parents to whom it might not have occurred to use Boots' developing service. Similarly, it may be that 'cookies' in an Internet browser's cache may also be inspected by marketing companies and it is also reported that some Internet users may have unwittingly downloaded spyware which reports on their surfing habits. As Rifkin points out, though this may all be felt as convenient by the customer, what we are witnessing is a shift from the commodification of goods and services to the commodification of human relationships [....] By shifting from discrete market transactions that are limited in time and space to commodification of relationships that extend open-endedly over time, the new commercial sphere assures that more and more of daily life is held hostage to the bottom line (97) 'Age of access' though this may be, unsurprisingly somebody owns something, even if the property is intangible intellectual property. In the networked society how much more lucrative it would be if you owned not only the property to which customers want access, but also the network through which they gained access to it. And so we see the giant media corporations jostling for control, not only of the 'bits', but also of the pipes through which the bits are squirted. Disney buys Infoseek, At Home Network buys Excite, AOL and Time-Warner merge in the struggle to become the dominant gatekeepers. (This is discussed more fully under the section on the Internet, as well as that on media ownership in the UK) Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 123.21 Kb. Share with your friends:
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